ABOUT ADVERTISE CONTACT US GUEST POST GUIDELINES EMAIL POSTS Android iOS Mac Windows Google Cloud Evernote Springpad Productivity Enter keywords... Follow Us POPULAR LATEST COMMENTS TAGS Comparing Tumblr and Springpad vs Pinte re st vs Eve rnote Posterous vs… Nobody? JUNE 16 , 20 11 BY KARMA 19 COMMENTS APRIL 12, 20 12 Hello there! If you are new here, please consider subscribing to the X Could Google Drive Be An Eve rnote RSS feed or following us on Twitter to receive site updates. Alte rnative ? APRIL 28 , 20 12 PDFmyURL.com What Chrome Apps Do You Actually Use ? [Re ade r Fe e dback] MAY 11, 20 12 How Many Unre ad Me ssage s Are in Your Inbox? MAY 28 , 20 12 Should This Android Love r Switch Back to iOS? MAY 13, 20 12 Today, 40Tech is pleased to present a guest post by Karma. You suave and debonaire 40Tech readers likely know all about microblogging. If you like the ease of sharing things through Facebook and Twitter but wish you could post longer Premium WP Hosting entries with more f ormatting, Tumblr or Posterous might be what you need. Alternatively, if Premium Hosting Tuned For Speed, you want to start a blog but have been overwhelmed by WordPress, Movable Type, or Reliability & Security. Shop Today www.wp e ng ine .co m Blogger – Tumblr and Posterous are a dream come true. Posting to both sites allows all the standard f eatures of a blog post: you can toggle between rich text and HTML, ITT Tech - Official Site customize your theme, split your entries into multiple pages and alter the f ormatting. 100 + Locations & Online Programs However, these sites are taking the lead over traditional blogging platf orms because it is Official ITT Tech Site. Get Info! much easier to get up and running. They also have some f eatures that leave those other www2.itt-te ch.e d u blogging sites in the dust. DeVry University PDFmyURL.com Earn A Relevant & Marketable Degree At DeVry University. Apply Today! www.De vry.e d u Web Search Search 40Tech on Facebook Like 380 40 Te c h o n Fa c e bo o k What We’re Reading Gamr TaskMac - The Mac Productivity Blog PDFmyURL.com Tech Goes Strong The Soap Boxers Aibal What They Have Common The f irst and most important thing Posterous and Tumblr share is this: it is ridiculously Archives easy to start a new blog. All you have to do is click on a button, give it a name and you are ready to dive in. You don’t even have to commit to a name because you can easily change Select Month both the name and url of your site at any time. This has af f ected the culture of Tumblr because there are so many one-of f sites. For example, when Arcade Fire won a grammy, someone started a tumblog called Who is Arcade Fire, which posted examples of angry f ans complaining about this band they’d never heard of . This sort of site that is incredibly 40Tech Team timely and f ocused on something very specif ic is common on Tumblr. If you’ve ever had a crazy idea f or a site but thought it would be too much work to set up a whole new blog, Founding Editor: you may want to use Tumblr f or it. Such are the things book deals are made of Evan Kline Contact | Twitter If using your own custom domain is a sticking point, don’t worry as both sites support it. You can also have custom pages, other than your blog (e.g. Links, About, etc.). Perhaps Senior Editor: you are concerned about making sure content plays nice with your smart phone. Bobby Travis Posterous has a nice clean interf ace on my Android; Tumblr’s is damn sexy – though Contact | Twitter Tumblr’s currently has a bug that will only let you post to your main blog. If your phone isn’t f ancy but does have email, you can use Posterous to post by email (more on that later). With either site it is dead simple to take a picture with your phone and have it up on your site in no time, and both sites allow you to post content at a later date. This is a great way to keep content f resh and not overwhelm your readers. For example, on my hyperlocal site, I have a “hooptie of the month” picture. I actually posted all of the pictures at one time, but they only show up on the dates I’ve scheduled—shh! Don’t tell! This encourages Tumblr to have shorter posts: why post all ten hoopties f rom the car show, when I can get twelve posts out of it? The advantage with Posterous is that they actually support f ormatting the date in a multitude of ways, so you could type 12/22/12 or Dec. 22 2012 and it will f igure out what PDFmyURL.com you mean. Tumblr has only one f ormat and they don’t tell you what it is, so I’m of ten lef t scratching my head trying to f igure out how they want it typed. However I think Tumblr wins because they have a queuing option. Just click “Add to my queue” and it will wait to post that item f or a f ew hours. You may customize the queue so that queued posts go up at a certain time, or you may rearrange the order they will post. Finally, if you want to have a group site or accept submissions f rom the masses, both sites will make the process easy f or you and your users. In the next section, we will get into the gritty on where each of these sites truly shines. In Favor of Posterous Post by Email PDFmyURL.com The beaming pride of Posterous is the ability to send an email to a secret address that will automatically post to your blog. We’re not just talking about text here. Attached photos will show up as a slide show and attached music will display in a music player. Add tags by putting them in double parenthesis in the Subject box. All you need is a link to a YouTube video to get it to display the embedded player. Pretty much anything you can post, you can post by email. Uploads Aplenty Tumblr only allows one song to be uploaded every day. This doesn’t include songs PDFmyURL.com embedded through other sites or links to songs posted on your own server, just what they hold onto f or you. Also remember that you could post ten songs and queue them to post at dif f erent times in the week. But if you’re determined to post f ive songs every day, this could be a f actor. In Posterous, you may upload 100 MB, regardless of what the content is. At that size, you’re more likely to be limited by your email provider (though you can still post via the web). Import Your Existing Blog If you already have an existing blog that you’d be switching f rom, this could be the deal- breaker on Tumblr. It’s easy to switch to Posterous because you can use their import f eature to bring in all the posts you wrote on some other site, whether that site be Ning, Tumblr, TypePad, WordPress, ActiveRain, TwitPic, Blogger, or Movable Type. Private Blogs While you can set certain posts to be private, only in Posterous can you make the whole blog private. You could start a blog f or your f amily reunion, f or example, that only members of your f amily can see. Tumblr is very much about their community, so it is understandable that their site is not designed f or this f unctionality. Autopost Autopost is the f eature that has me devoted to Posterous. Ever known someone that PDFmyURL.com somehow manages to post all their content everywhere? Ever wish you could post once and have everything go to all your sites? Sure, there are other sites that will automatically send your blog to Facebook and Twitter. But with Posterous, you can set it to automatically send the pictures in your blog Picasa and Flickr. That concert f ootage you just blogged will automatically post to your YouTube account. Most importantly, you can autopost to your own domain. And you can do this all by sending one email. Recently I noticed that the pictures and music I autoposted weren’t displaying with the pretty f ormatting I mentioned above—no nif ty music player or picture gallery, just a long string of pics and an icon that says “click to listen on Posterous.” The issue was only on sites where I autoposted; it showed up on Posterous f ine. I could understand if they did this deliberately, to drive traf f ic back to Posterous blogs. I emailed them to ask if this was a permanent change or if it was a bug and they wrote back, “Thanks for the report, we’ve been responding to changes in the autopost destination’s API, and are working hard to maintain/restore the functionality you’re used to.” This is critical, as it would be unacceptable to have my main blog look like a duplicate site that redirects to a Posterous blog! Hopef ully they will have this resolved soon.